Stop misnaming Republican Lincoln Day dinners

While viewing Steven Spielberg's compelling film, "Lincoln",  I couldn't avoid  thinking of the wide gulf between the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln's age and the impostors that have kidnapped the GOP of today. In the 1860s, Republicans were the good guys who supported their president's efforts to preserve the Union and free the slaves.  Lincoln had little hope that he would be reelected.   The Democrats were the bad guys clinging to slavery while engaged in a war of secession.

But in a dramatic reversal of roles,  the capture of the Republican Party by the Tea Partyers and their wealthy enablers has openly abused the Lincoln of wisdom, courage and patriotism (so sensitively  revealed by Daniel Day-Lewis).  There is still silly talk of secession within wacko groups.
And few will deny that racism kept Barack Obama's victory closer than it might have been.  For confirmation, simply check the figures of white-guy voters.

In February, or a little later,  Republicans will stage their traditional Lincoln Day Dinners, often showing preference for right-wing GOP speakers.   The trend by the Summit County GOP, for example,  has featured   such conservative icons  as Mike Huckabee (whom, it says in the invitation, is a "leading favorite to top"  the 2012 presidential ticket;  Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the party's very very conservative Study Committee;  and Rick Santorum, who needs no further introduction.  I have occasionally referred to these misnamed "Lincoln" events as identity  thefts.

 Although I don't expect happier results, may I suggest that now that they have lost the election, the  sponsors of these political stage shows find a new name for the dinners .  The  Norquist Day Dinner?  The LaPierre Day Dinner?  At least this would be a more honest approach and not slander Lincoln in his grave.

A letter to update Abe Lincoln

Open Letter to Abraham Lincoln:

Dear Mr. President:

It's been quite awhile since we've heard from you and I thought it might be a good time to bring you up to date on your party (Now old, but hardly grand these days.). Sadly, you would not recognize it, even though local pretenders still hold Lincoln Day dinners in a blatant annual exercise of identity theft. Whatever works for a night out, I guess.

Would it be too much to ask the Lincoln Day hosts what attributes are shared with you today? Yes, I guess it would.

You have been remembered throughout the years - even in a few textbooks in South Carolina and Georgia - as a great leader who kept the Union from dividing. How times have changed! A new generation of Republican governors is now plotting at several levels with plans that not only divide their constituents but divide us as a means of conquering the unions themselves. Rapacious members of your party, from Washington to state capitals, have created such havoc that the deep political wounds to the national interest will linger for many years to come.

I'm sure that you recognize the ninjas among us today with their talk of states rights, nullification and secession that is making the rounds. John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis would have felt quite at home with this gang, right?

But there's more to illustrate that despite your heroic efforts at governance in troubled times, the GOP is giving up its soul daily with scandalous theatrics that have nothing to do with how we live together as the Republic that you saved at your own peril. Yesterday, Rep. Peter King of New York staged a reprehensible McCarthy-like hearing in congress that singled out one group of Americans as the enemies of the people. Peter King, for God's sake, the devout supporter of the IRA across the ocean. The show trial against Muslims was such a pathetic political farce that it should have embarrassed every American while serving to dishonor all of the Tea Party- inspired robots on Capitol Hill.

There was nothing to be gained from it in meeting the challenges of modern terrorism. It was strictly for show, and nothing at all was learned from it. How shameful, don't you think, Mr. President?

You have also missed the clinical madness of several Republican presidential pretenders. Let me update you.

Mike Huckabee, a former preacher mining his audiences along the yellow brick road, has tried to associate President Obama with a Mau Mau childhood. And Crazy Guggenheim (aka Newt Gingrich) ludicrously explained his adulterous married life (on the Christian Broadcasting Network, no less) on forces that were well beyond his control. He said his powerful libido was partly driven by his deep passion for his country. He was standing in front of big American flag when he said it.

And up in Wisconsin, the billionaire-owned governor, Scott Walker, is proudly proclaiming a victory on the backs of public worker unions, fibbing that it was all about budget deficits. From all that I have read about you, Mr. President, I'm convinced you were a sensitive man, quite conscious of the welfare of other human beings. If you were here to see this fellow Walker, you might agree with me that he is a deadpan with motionless eyes who never makes eye contact with anybody else. It's creepy, don't you think?

Finally, since every Scatterbrained Republican on the TV news each night is considered to be presidential (dead) timber, there's a gal up in Minnesota, Rep. Michele Bachmann, who has lowered herself to be the queen of the congressional Tea Party Caucus. It is her right of passage to Fox News and other right-wing asylums(and you think you had it bad!) where she can pursue her certainty that President Obama is the capo di tutti capi of a gangster government.

I should leave you for now, Mr. President. It's too depressing to continue. I want to tell you however, that I will best serve your honorable leadership by staying away from those Lincoln Day Dinners. They have become nothing more than show trials, too. Meantime, you and I can both ask of these troubled troublemakers: Is that all you've got?

Respectfully,

Abe Zaidan , AKA Grumpy Abe

The problem with polls naming best presidents

THE HEADLINE on the POLITICO home page declared:

Americans rate Reagan best president

It then told us of a new Gallup poll that reported 19 pct. of those surveyed - 19 pct. - listed Dutch as their favorite. Lincoln came in second with 14 pct. And my hunch is that a majority of Americans couldn't name many presidents before Reagan of maybe even the first George Bush.

So what's the point?

When Democrats reach for their hankies

"It's like deja vu all over again" - Yogi Berra

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS are mournful worriers. The untreatable sense of foreboding by my crowd is a kind of genetic guilt that took hold when the Democratic Party, which was less than progressive, foolishly endorsed George McClellan, a terrible general, against Lincoln in 1864. But things were so bad that even Lincoln, a Republican seeking a second term against the backdrop of the Civil War, didn't think he would be reelected. Since then the prevailing gloom among liberals was that if there was a way to lose an election, Democrats would certainly find it. It's the curse of John McClellan.

Nowadays, although some Dems are putting up a brave front, down deep they just know that Governor Strickland will be a one-term governor because of his dithering over a state budget. They flinch and reach for their moist handkerchiefs when polls show his approval rating in a nosedive. Frankly, I have no idea how that will turn out at the polls next year. The media will be full of dire warnings for Strickland, and will continue to urge him to raise taxes to pay some bills. That, of course, would only serve to increase the despair in his party, particularly among other Democratic candidates on the state ticket who will be forced to toss and turn at press conferences over whether they support tax increases, too.

On the other hand, liberals will be scowling at Republican John Kasich, hanging effigies of him in their basements, and fretting that their party's brief years of glory will be ended regardless of Kasich's ludicrous sing-song pledges to lower taxes. He, after all, was a big-time executive with Lehman Brothers before it tanked and would not be expected to know something worthwhile about the financial system. Sorry, not enough to assuage hanky-twisting liberals that the end is near. They will keep their cell phones turned on should a friend want to report the latest dismal poll. Damn the McClellan curse anyway!

There is even concern with the aforementioned crowd about President Obama, who still has three and half years remaining to define his work before the next election. My friends have been skittish about polls that say Barack has dropped some points but remains around 60 pct. job approval. It is of no consolation among always- nervous Dems that as a married man cavorting with a teenage girl friend, Italy's Silvio Belusconi's approval rating in the polls fell only two points. Boastfully defiant, the Italian president declared: "This is how I am. I am not going to change a thing. If they like me this way, they like me this way." The McClellan factor obviously has not found its way to Rome.

I quickly recall that during the past presidential election campaign, my gang was standing

on tall ladders looking ahead to the next poll and fully expecting defeat. John McCain and the national media mentioned more than once that the Republican was closing the gap. On the other hand McCain was cool and confident that nature, and even the Supreme Court, if necessary, would again favor the GOP.

Republicans, particularly conservatives, aren't like that at all. Guys like William Kristol, the Neocons' foster parent, grin their way through another Fox hour full of certainty that in the end, America is a just nation and will do what's extreme right. Even now, Kristol is finding ways to justify another national campaign for Sarah Palin.

It would have been different if Lincoln had been a Democrat.

A Pence for your thoughts

THE SUMMIT COUNTY Republican Party apparently has not taken  seriously the voters' rejection of hard-core conservative "values" in the past presidential election.  How else can one explain the word from chairman Alex Arshinkoff that the headliner for this year's Lincoln Day Dinner (March 27) will be a red-meat right-wing Limbaugh-Rove-Gingrich-Palin conservative  Republican congressman from Indiana, Mike Pence?  It makes no sense for a crippled party to retreat farther into the depths of its own isolation from any semblance of mainstream moderation.  What could this political garrison have in mind, particularly in a county top-heavy with Democrats who have  shown little regard for the welfare of cliff-hanging conservatives?  

And who is Mike Pence?  Well, he describes himself as an evangelical Christian , or expanding on that, a Christian first, and a Republican afterward.  He will bring to the rostrum Friday night his well-pronounced  values of antis - anti-abortion, anti-stem cell and anti-stiff tax on Wall Street bonuses, having added the last one Thursday in his futile vote against the bill.  (Rushbo loved that one.)   But in all fairness, Pence is not entirely wedded to negatives.  He is , and was, pro-Iraq war and pro-Bush tax cuts.  There are guys like Pence running around today that you don't even have to ask their names.  Reconstruct the "values" model and a Mike Pence figure automatically pops up.  

Frankly,   I shouldn't care less if the party faithful gathered over their salads and entrees to  watch old films of the army-McCarthy hearings.   But they shouldn't do it in the name of America's greatest president.  No, not Reagan.  Abraham Lincoln. The  gulf between the celebratory  fiction of the event and the historical truth of Lincoln's unique stature in the presidency is shameful.  Guys like Mike Pence, who boasts of his 100 pct. approval rating from the American Conservative Union,  only make it a mockery.

Eat well, folks, as I know you will.